'Haunting Ground' is an original

MONTY PHANNewsday

Published Sunday, June 12, 2005

One can only imagine the meeting where the idea for the Haunting Ground video game was pitched: "You play as a young woman who finds herself in a creepy castle and must escape -- without any guns. Oh, and your partner in the adventure is a dog that you have to train to do stuff."

In an industry whose products often measure problem-solving abilities as factors of firepower, it's a wonder that Haunting Ground even got produced. And although it has some major flaws, its originality saves it from becoming another mediocre distressed-damsel-caught-in-creepy-castle game.

You play as Fiona Belli, who awakens to find herself in a cellar after surviving a car crash that killed her parents. Wearing only a bedsheet, Fiona's first goal is to find herself some clothes, and -- in what seems to be one cliche the game designers couldn't resist -- she ends up wearing an outfit that covers far less than the bedsheet did.

The goal of the game is to escape from the castle. Right away, though, Fiona encounters a major problem: a hulking Quasimodo-like beast of a man who likes to chase her. Where other survival-horror-type games would have you try to blow the guy to bits, Haunting Ground forces you into an alternative approach: retreat.

To make this easier, the game gives you places to hide -- under a bed, behind curtains, in a closet -- with the caveat that if you use a spot too many times, your pursuer eventually will get wise to you. While there are some aspects of combat, such as Fiona's ability to kick her opponents or knock them down, these are basically there to give you time to flee.

After acquainting yourself with Fiona, you come across the dog Hewie, whom you can command to attack an enemy, retrieve items from places you can't reach or just come to your side. Because he won't always heed your commands, you can praise or scold him to "teach" him.

All of this serves to create original gameplay, but with some drawbacks. A few: Hewie isn't always obedient, which makes the game more realistic but more frustrating; even if I were hiding in a place I'd never used before, I'd still be found, forcing me to flee again; and although I appreciate the absence of health bars, maps and other things that typically clutter the game screen, there's no meter to indicate when Fiona becomes weak with loss of "stamina," which frequently happens with all that running.

Bottom line: An original experience that succeeds in the "creep-out" department, Haunting Ground gets an above-average grade. It's rated "mature"; for the Sony PlayStation 2.